‘This is worse than Mordor!’ said Sam. ‘Much worse in a way. It comes home to you, as they say; because it is home, and you remember it before it was all ruined.’

‘Yes, this is Mordor,’ said Frodo. ‘Just one of its works.’

Unless some enterprising army general turns up pretty soon, the Catholics in Ireland are going to have the experience of beings strangers in their own lands, as their brethren in England and Wales have done for so long. Many people have commented on the vote, and will comment. Of the things I have read, two in particular have struck me. The first is yesterday’s sermon from the Prior of Silverstream, of which this is a part:

Friday’s vote was not about abortion only; it was about killing Ireland’s soul, about snuffing out all that made Ireland a beacon among the nations, about publicly renouncing all that, from the time that Saint Patrick kindled his blazing fire on the Hill of Slane, made this island home of ours a great welcoming Catholic hearth in a world grown cold and dark.

The other was from Joseph Shaw, who observes among other things: “we are living in an integralist society, […] just not a Catholic one.”

But seeing the pictures of young women singing in the streets, I was reminded most of all of John Lamont’s important and difficult paper, ‘Conscience, Freedom, Rights: Idols of the Enlightenment’. He argues that the doctrines of conscience, human freedom, and rights, in the form in which they have become dominant in the last few hundred years, coalesce to what may truly be called a religion, which has the self as its object of worship. This explains, he argues, why the Enlightenment ideology has proved so successful in winning converts, despite the failure of its promises.

Its success rests on the fact that the Enlightenment offers a religious goal, in the form of an ultimate authority and good to be sought; that making the self that goal has a powerful appeal to human nature in its fallen state; and that the depth of sin involved in choosing this goal produces an extreme form of bondage and spiritual blindness which is very hard to break.

This goal has presented itself in different guises – as communism, Nazism or consumerism – but the fundamental concept and its appeal remains the same. It is the driving force behind the vulgar and base consumerism and sexual depravity that characterizes modern society. Previous non-Christian societies would have found these practices shameful and embarrassing. This natural human reaction is overridden, and even made use of, by the Enlightenment religion. This religion gives these forms of decadence a deeper meaning, the meaning of adoration of the deified self. The natural guilt and shame they provoke are transmuted into a proclamation of the self, which by rejecting the moral law is declaring its total supremacy.

The deep and sincere belief in the human right to have an abortion gets its strength from being the ultimate expression of the Enlightenment religion. It supporters understand that abortion is the murder of an innocent child, although they may not publicly proclaim this fact, or even consciously admit it to themselves. It is precisely its status as murder of the most innocent that makes abortion the triumph of the deified self as the ultimate end.

NI is the last part of the British Isles where the unborn child enjoys the protection of the law. All the powers of hell are no doubt conjoined in the struggle to remove this protection. The latest stratagem is to point out the horrible fact that disabled untermenschen are permitted to draw breath in NI who might have been hygienically destroyed in mainland Britain. The leader of NI Alliance Party has called for a ‘consultation’ about the extending of eugenic cleansing to Ulster.

Having been roundly chastised by Aelianus for hardly ever posting anything on here, and prompted by the subject matter of a recent conversation with the aforementioned, behold the first in a sure to be sporadic and unspectacular series of posts about people I don’t like very much. First on the list, Margaret Sanger.

There is, of course, no shortage of anti-Sanger stuff online, but it is surprising (in a ‘not really that surprising’ sense) how little of this is ever mentioned in the mainstream media in arguments about “women’s health” and “reproductive rights.” The same could be said for Sangers’ contemporary and fellow eugenicist, our very own Marie Stopes.

Planned Parenthood, (which kills a baby every 96 seconds and gets over $500 million a year from the US taxpayer), is the result of an amalgamation of various organisations, the most notable of which was Sanger’s American Birth Control League (ABCL), whose mouthpiece was the Birth Control Review (1917-1940). (Stopes was a bit more up-front about the agenda – in 1921 she founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress) You can read archives of the Birth Control Review online here – for those with neither the time nor the inclination, Sanger’s contributions include articles entitled: “Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics” (June 1920), “The Eugenic Conscience” (Feb 1921), “The Purpose of Eugenics” (Dec 1924), “Birth Control and Positive Eugenics” (July 1925) and “Birth Control: The True Eugenics.” On the Church, she says:

“The Catholic Church is the bigoted, relentless enemy of birth control. This [birth control] movement threatens its hold upon the poor and the ignorant, and probably only the existence of restraining laws prevents it from applying the thumb-screw and the rack to all those who believe in a woman’s right to practice voluntary motherhood.” Birth Control Review, June 1918

Recently, I came across a video of Sanger being interviewed on American TV. It is quite chilling to listen to her speak. One of the most revealing excerpts reads as follows:

Interviewer: “Do you believe in sin… do you believe there is such a thing as sin?” Sanger: “I believe that the biggest sin in the world is bringing children in the world… that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being, practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things, just marked when they’re born. That to me is the greatest sin.”

In Salvation is From the Jews, Roy Schoeman has a fascinating chapter on ‘Ideological Foundations of Nazism’ in which he examines the interplay between the birth control movement, eugenics and euthanasia in the years leading up to the Holocaust. Commenting on Sanger, he says:

“Her plans for a national eugenics programme consisted of the same elements found in the Third Reich – forced sterilisation and concentration camps (which she referred to euphemistically as ‘segregation’ or ‘separation’.) Consider the following points from her “Plan for Peace”, published in her Birth Control Review (April 1932):

d. to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilisation and segregation to that grade of the population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.

f. to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilisation.

g. to apportion farmlands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.” [page 189]

The modern-day Planned Parenthood supporter would (one hopes!) be embarrassed by this, but PP are hardly falling over themselves to distance themselves from Sanger’s worldview. Cf . The Annual PPFA Margaret Sanger Award, which PP says is its “highest honour.”

“..the best way to ensure that women are not victimized by coercive government practices is to make sure that they have access to family planning. For those who care so deeply about reducing the abortion rate, the best way to make sure we reduce abortion is to provide access to safe family planning. (Applause.)”

She also reminded everyone that:

“Margaret Sanger’s work here in the United States and certainly across our globe is not done.”

Fast forward to March 2013, and here is a Planned Parenthood person giving the PP line on whether a baby lying alive on a table following a botched abortion should be “victimized by coercive government practices.” Margaret Sanger would be proud.

To see the London Times, a pro-abortion, energetically pro-euthanasia and also a pro-(excuse me) sodomy newspaper, solemnly invoke the authority of the second Letter of St Peter in its leading article today in order to chide the Church of England for the vote against woman bishops – well, it would be sickening if it weren’t hilarious.

The present position is worse than that before the time of Christ. It is not the ignorance of a child but the madness of an old, and at one time very cultured, man (R. Garrigou-Lagrange, ‘Priesthood and Perfection’, chapter 7).

Do not skip over this because it’s a video and you have to go to another page. Watch it even if you do not know German – for the most part the commentary merely describes what is happening on film. The clinic is near Vienna’s Westbahnhof. The guy on the bike is the abortionist – the security cameras are his, so he can see perfectly well what is going on. The guys hassling the protesters are not hire-a-claque from a downmarket version of the Socialist Workers Party, but the doctor’s co-workers.